Village in limbo as construction roils peace talks

NUAMAN, West Bank — The Palestinian village of Nuaman epitomizes the tangled borders and conflicting pressures that make Jerusalem the toughest challenge facing Mideast peace efforts.

Nuaman exists in limbo. Although it lies within Jerusalem's city limits, Israel considers its few dozen inhabitants to be West Bankers, and provides them with only the barest of services. A barrier built to keep out suicide bombers cuts it off from its surroundings.

And a Jewish neighborhood called Har Homa looms over Nuaman, threatening to swallow up the village of stone houses, olive, almond and cypress trees and patches of tilled land.

The plight of Nuaman cuts to the heart of the most emotionally charged issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one that has derailed peace talks in the past: competing claims to the holy city and its Muslim, Jewish and Christian shrines.

Palestinians claim the city's eastern sector for a future capital, and say Israeli construction at Har Homa and other disputed territory imperils efforts to reach an accord by the end of the year.

"Our future is darkness," said Yusuf Darawi, a building contractor in Nuaman. "We don't see the future."

Since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched peace talks at an international conference in Annapolis, Md., in November, the Israeli government has announced plans to build hundreds of apartments in east Jerusalem, adding more than 650 to Har Homa's existing 2,100. Government planning authorities are reviewing a plan to build an additional 1,000 apartments on an undeveloped section of Har Homa, a project that would vastly expand the neighborhood's scope and bring it to the edge of Nuaman.

Visitors to Nuaman — family, friends, the TV repairman — must have military permission to enter. Residents say they can't get building permits from Israeli authorities because they're West Bankers. And children who until the mid-1990s studied in Jerusalem have had to move to West Bank schools.

A yellow steel gate bars vehicles from traveling a now-impassable road that once led to nearby Arab villages within Jerusalem's borders.

Villagers still hike that road in violation of military orders — some to work on construction projects in Har Homa, whose apartment buildings overlook Nuaman.

It's a painful irony not lost on Mohammed Ali.

Aged 23, with a geography degree from Al Quds University in east Jerusalem, Ali has for much of the past year been setting stones in the walls of future homes in Har Homa.

"When I go out, I feel I'm working for the good of the Israelis, not the Arabs," Ali said. "It's not a good feeling. If I could find a job with the Palestinian government, I'd leave tomorrow, but there's no work."

Jerusalem was divided from 1948 until 1967, cutting off Jews' access to their holy places. Israel captured the Arab sector in the 1967 Mideast war, annexed it, and built new neighborhoods there that are home to 180,000 Israelis. It regards the territory as part of sovereign Israel and does not consider neighborhoods such as Har Homa to be settlements, as do the Palestinians and the international community.

Progress toward peace could go a long way toward bolstering moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in his do-or-die showdown with the Islamic militants of Hamas, which violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip last June.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, meanwhile, is caught in his own political vise. Washington wants him to seal a deal before President Bush leaves office next January, but a large coalition partner has threatened to quit Olmert's government and strip him of his parliamentary majority if he dares cede even an inch of east Jerusalem.

On March 17, Olmert reasserted Israel's intention to keep building in Har Homa.

"Everyone knows that there is no chance that the state of Israel will give up a neighborhood like ... Har Homa. It is an inseparable part of Jerusalem," Olmert told a joint news conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"If they really want the year 2008 to be a year of peace," countered Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, "then this cannot be achieved with the continuation of settlement activities."

Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who defends Palestinian rights in the city, agreed.

"Negotiating Jerusalem's borders in good faith and simultaneously determining these borders with bulldozers is mutually incompatible," he said. "If this continues, Annapolis will be stillborn."

Privately, Palestinian leaders acknowledge that Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem will remain in Israeli hands in any peace deal, likely in exchange for an equal amount of Israeli land. But they contend that Israeli construction in east Jerusalem shows bad faith. And the building is clearly a political minefield for Abbas.

Public opinion is clearly getting tougher on both sides.

Although Olmert has indicated willingness to relinquish some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside the Old City, polling shows a majority of Israeli Jews oppose any compromise on Jerusalem. Hardening the opposition to ceding land is the Palestinian missile bombardment of Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip, which Israeli evacuated in 2005.

Meanwhile, a poll this month showed support for Abbas and his Fatah Party slipping. If elections were held now, Hamas would receive 35 percent of the vote, compared to 42 percent for Fatah, the survey showed.

In December, Hamas would have received 31 percent, compared to 49 percent for Fatah. Abbas would receive 46 percent of the vote in a presidential race, down from 56 percent in December, while his Hamas rival, Ismail Haniyeh, would take 47 percent, up from 37 percent.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, the independent think tank that polled 1,270 people, gave a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

It said the results showed Abbas and Fatah to be "impotent, unable to change the bitter reality in the West Bank or ending Israeli occupation through diplomacy."

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